Working with clients to deliver solutions provides ample opportunity for success as well as failure. This article focuses on how to address three shortcomings that often contribute to performance solutions missing the mark. These shortcomings include (a) the "framework" used to view, discuss, and analyze performance is too narrow; (b) performance…

Results of this study provided indirect support for Marshall's (1965) Hypothesis with regard to the informational versus motivational properties of punishment (punishment of specific responses has discriminative or informative value, whereas punishment applied to the situation may have primary motivational value). (Author)

The present study showed that the inconsistent results with regard to the relationships between locus of control, school achievement, and intelligence are at least partly due to the fact that the various methods used to assess locus of control are sufficiently different not to be equally applicable in all situations. (Author)

Female college students were given a training task involving anagrams, mathematical problems, perceptual identifications, or all three. Results indicate that increasing the variety of training tasks at high or low levels of required effort contributes to the student's abstraction of a general principle concerning degree of effort required for…

Student performance in a self-paced personalized system of instruction course is varied in rates and patterns of work. Using 118 students in a college level introductory psychology course the investigators found 1) students worked at a variety of rates and patterns; 2) students who started to work early had a much greater chance of finishing the…

The effects of two types of self-determined reinforcement contingencies on children's test performances were investigated and compared to each other and to externally determined contingencies. Suggested that self-management that includes self-determined contingencies of reinforcement procedures may provide useful techniques. (Author)

This investigation attempted to clarify the effects of different classes of reinforcement on the size discrimination learning of normal and low achieving third grade middle class boys. The classes of reinforcement consisted of tangible reinforcement, person reinforcement (praise), and performance reinforcement (correctness of response). Each of…

The effects of amount of exposure to response/outcome independence and teacher expressiveness on student ratings of the instructor, achievement test performance, and attribution items were studied. University students completed an aptitude test that provided contingent or noncontingent feedback and varied in length (short, medium, or long). All…

Two experiments investigated the differential effects of praise and correctness reinforcers on the task performance of black children from lower and middle socioeconomic classes, also examining the influence of sex differences, experimenter race, and the interactions between these variables. (EH)

The effects of covert operant reinforcement upon remedial reading learning tasks were investigated. Forty junior high school students were taught to imagine either neutral scenes (control) or positive scenes (treatment) upon cue while reading. It was hypothesized that positive covert reinforcement would enhance performance on several measures of…

Levels of aspiration and student predictions as applied to test performance were employed in this longitudinal investigation of the process of self-evaluation. Two hundred and ten students from a rural secondary school in general and earth science classes were grouped according to previously demonstrated academic ability. Throughout the school…

The usefulness of individual reinforcement schedules in maximizing the attending to task and math percentage correct of 12 behavior disordered/learning disabled (BD/LD) adolescents is examined. Results indicate that individual reinforcement schedules are important to the academic success of some adolescent BD/LD students. (Author)

To determine the relationships among perceived contingency of teacher administered reinforcements, locus of control, and academic achievement, 49 sixth-grade boys were studied. In general, subjects who perceived their teachers as contingently punitive to boys were internal in locus of control and performed well on measures of academic achievement.…